Encyclopedia of Linguistics

Sample Entry: Swadesh, Morris

MORRIS SWADESH: CRITICAL ESSAY

Like his teacher Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh was a
prolific data-gatherer and avid student of languages. From
his Russian parents he learned Yiddish. As an undergraduate
at the University of Chicago, he studied German and French,
and as a graduate and postgraduate at Yale University he
concentrated on Nootka, a Canadian indigenous language. On
his regular field trips through Canada, the United States,
and Mexico, he collected data on more than 20 native
languages. In Mexico, he developed programs for indigenous
people to attain literacy in their own languages. Later,
during World War II, he worked for the war department,
editing dictionaries, providing linguistic analyses of
foreign languages, and developing teaching materials for
Spanish, Russian, Burmese, and Chinese.

Swadesh did his first theoretical work on phonemic
analysis, i.e. the analysis of the sound structure or
phonology of languages. Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Nikolai
Trubetzkoy, and others had already advanced the concept of
the “phoneme,” an abstract representation of
sound types. Swadesh’s contribution was to
develop a set of principles to help the phonologist discover
phonemes on the basis of the distribution of sounds in a
given language. English, for example, uses different
"p"-sounds in pit, upper, and spill. Since the
pronunciation is in each case clearly dependent on the exact
position within the word, Swadesh suggested that these
positional sound variants are in “complementary
distribution” and should thus be regarded as instances
of the same sound type or phoneme.These principles were later
applied to word and sentence elements by Zellig Harris.
Distributional analysis thus became a general
“discovery procedure” for the basic elements of
linguistic structure and has remained an integral part of
linguistic methodology to this day.

In his extensive investigations of numerous languages,
Swadesh gained an increasing appreciation of apparent lexical
and structural similarities in different languages, and his
interest in comparative historical linguistics grew. Since
his study of nearly extinct languages was conducted with
limited resources, he felt the need for a standardized
procedure for quickly collecting crucial data yielding clues
about language relationships.

To determine whether two given languages are related,
historical linguists usually employ the “comparative
method.” This means that they attempt to reconstruct an
ancestor language on the basis of cognates, i.e. arguably
related words from different languages
(Englishhound is a cognate of German
Hund “dog”). Since cultural development is
always accompanied by lexical innovations, Swadesh--and many
linguists before him-- felt that presumably more stable
“basic vocabulary” would be the best place to
start looking for cognates. The basic vocabulary of a
language describes body parts and functions, such as skin,
blood, drink, natural phenomena like water, sky, bird,
smoke, immediate sense experiences and physical
dimensions, such as long, red, cold. While the concept
of basic vocabulary had been informally used before, Swadesh
made it explicit by drafting a list of 100 word meanings that
a field worker investigating any language could use for
identifying the basic vocabulary of that language. The use of
this list, now generally known as the “Swadesh
list,” has drawn criticism from its inception. Many
linguists believe that it is impossible to enumerate
universal meanings, and that the identification of
semantically equivalent words in different languages is often
highly problematic. Nevertheless, the list has become a
widely used tool in comparative linguistics.

Even though the notion of basic vocabulary was already
contentious, Swadesh pressed forward and used his list for
lexicostatistics, a quantitative method for measuring the
similarity of languages. If the basic vocabulary of one
language matches that of another to over 90 percent, Swadesh
argued, these languages must be closely related. Most
linguists believe that the reconstruction of ancestor
languages provides more reliable evidence for the relatedness
of languages than statistical analyses, so lexicostatistics
continues to be viewed with suspicion. Yet, moderate
linguists today concede that the Swadesh list and
lexicostatistics may be useful for rough initial
investigations or for situations where complete data are
simply unavailable--which is, in fact, close to what Swadesh
had in mind.

Even more controversially, Swadesh claimed that the
“decay” of basic vocabulary could be used for
“glottochronology,” the dating of ancestor
languages analogous to determining the age of fossils on the
basis of radioactive decay. Swadesh came to believe that
basic vocabulary decays with a rate of 14 percent over 1000
years, so languages would retain on average about 86 percent
of their basic vocabulary over this time span. Thus, if the
basic vocabularies of two related languages are found to
match by 70 percent, they can be assumed to have developed
from a single language that existed approximately 12
centuries before.The assumption that basic vocabulary decay
is generally uniform has been largely rejected. If one allows
that languages, just like societies, may develop at different
rates at different times, the assumption of steady vocabulary
decay in particular, and the glottochronological method in
general, is seriously undermined.

Swadesh’s name has remained symbolic for
lexicostatistics and glottochronology, but his central place
in the continuing and highly ideological debate about these
and related issues seems to rest on misunderstandings and/or
polemically slanted readings. He is, for example, accused of
introducing lexicostatistics as a shortcut for investigation,
attempting to avoid the hard work of reconstruction.
However, Swadesh stated repeatedly that a detailed knowledge
of the languages under investigation is crucial, and that
other data must be considered. Likewise, Swadesh is
misleadingly cited as a supporter of the theory that all
languages have developed from a single ancestor (the
“monogenesis” theory). He certainly conceded that
the instinctive vocalizations of early humanoids may be
called a species-specific “language,” but he also
surmised that as soon as arbitrary signs--i.e. true words and
complex linguistic structures--entered the human repertoire,
diversification was the instant result.

These ideas were the focus of his major book, The
Origin and Diversification of Language, but he died of a
heart attack before he was able to complete it. His arguments
thus remained somewhat sketchy, which may explain why
Swadesh’s even-handed and careful deliberations tend to
be overshadowed by the bolder aspects of his thought.

PHILIPP STRAZNY

Biography

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, 22 January 1909. BA
(1930), MA (1931) for dissertation on Nootka aspect, tutored
by Edward Sapir, University of Chicago; followed Sapir to
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Ph.D. for work on
Nootka semantics, 1933, then work at Yale on synchronic
phonological theory and on American English grammar, 1933-37.
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin--Madison,
1937-39. Moved to Mexico City, there Director, Consejo
de Lenguas Indígenas, and Director of Linguistics,
Departamento de Asuntos Indígenas, 1939; Professor,
Instituto Politécnico Nacional de México,
Escuela de Antropología, and Departamento de Asuntos
Indigenas, 1939-41. Linguist for the War Department in New
York City during World War II; Associate Professor, City
University of New York, 1948; lost his teaching appointment
and had his passport revoked because of “leftist”
views and activities; librarian at the Boas Collection,
Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia,
PA, 1949-53; independent field work 1953-56. Moved again to
Mexico City, there Professor at the Instituto de Historia,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and
the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia,
1956-67. Member, Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
in 1931, Life Member in 1937; member of two special interest
groups of the LSA, 1939; President of the Linguistic Section
of the 29th International Congress of Americanists, 1939;
editor of Word, 1946-49. Died in Mexico City, 20
July 1967.

Selected Works

The Expression of the Ending-Point Relation in English,
French, and German, 1932